Encounters with the Unknown—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, December 2023
Mandalas, Gateways, Balls of Light, and Synchronicities
by: Brent Raynes
My wife Joan between Lightfoot and his wife Fleet Deer outside of their residence in Mahoney City, Pennsylvania, shortly after Joan’s strange experience during our visit with them in April 1977.
I was introduced to Al Roush of Akron at the home of UFO contactee Madeline Teagle of Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, back in the first week of August 1975, during a UFO skywatch in her backyard where he was attempting to telepathically communicate with, and thus call down from the skies above, the pilots of UFOs, with whom he was allegedly quite familiar with. Though nothing extraordinary (at least from my perspective) happened that night, I did manage to tape record an interview with Roush, which I had been very much wanting to do since the previous month when Madeline had described to me a number of remarkable firsthand experiences, she had had with him - experiences that went back to the late 1950s. For example, in one instance a mysterious ball of silvery white light seemed to roll across the lawn of Madeline's home, right between herself and another lady. But probably the most remarkable incident was the night when Madeline had asked Roush if it might be possible for her to personally meet one of his alien contacts. And so, on this particular night, standing outside in the front yard of her home, he looked up into the sky for an apparent sign, and then claimed that he had gotten an impression that he should run across the street to an open field. Leaving Madeline alone, she soon noticed what she thought to be just a mere "patch of fog" over her rock garden. But then it began to take on an oval shape about six feet high, and one moment it was over the rock garden and then instantly it seemed it was right beside her. That's when the real twilight zone stuff began to happen. "Tentacles or something whipped out of that thing and wrapped right around me," she recalled. Naturally, this was quite a frightening development, but then she was relieved she said to hear a very pleasant human sounding laugh, next informing her that contact would be terminated due to her reaction of fear. Then the tentacle like extensions released her and the mysterious fog-like mass disappeared as mysteriously as it had appeared.
"You met him!" Roush excitedly shouted as he ran up to Madeline. But when Madeline recounted to him what had happened he explained that she had not perceived the ufonaut's true appearance. It seemed that her fear had perhaps acted as a mental block that had distorted her psychic perceptions. Silently gazing up into the sky, Madeline rebuked herself for blowing such a rare opportunity wished that she could be granted a sign of some sort, whereupon all of the clouds in the sky seemed to be drawn together into one forming a human like figure but with the head and wings of like an eagle. At this she mentally reflected that if that were the true appearance of Roush's contact then she be given another sign, whereupon a ball of fire dropped down from the sky and appeared to explode like fireworks over Roush's head. Then he turned to face Madeline and told her that whatever her question had been the answer was affirmative. She then described what she had seen and he confirmed that that was indeed the UFO being's true appearance.
Later that year, on September 4th, I met a respected MUFON (Mutal UFO Network) investigator named Larry Moyers of Akron, who also described to me his firsthand dealings with Roush and how he too had been quite bewildered. He recalled how on one occasion near Cleveland he and several others were with Roush when they came upon three small "football shaped lights" hovering near a bush. "They were transparent," Larry exclaimed. "You could see the leaves through them." Although it was raining, this was too much for him and he dove into the bush to make physical contact, at which point the lights simply disappeared.
On another occasion, Moyers hypnotized a young man at Madeline's home who informed him while in an entranced state that if he and a lady named Francis Renner were to go out to the front of the house then they would witness a UFO manifestation. They did, and Moyers recalled how they both observed "two balls of light, about the size of a traffic light, with that intensity, red, skimming three feet off the ground across the lawn, and I took out running after them and they went behind a tree and as each one went behind the tree they just plunked off."
One contactee named Karmie Tomocello, a close friend of Madeline's, also produced some very interesting experiences for the group. "She would go into an automatic writing pattern and would say if we would get in the yard at three in the morning we will see a green fireball coming in from the northwest at exactly the time, and it would happen," Moyers told me. He said that the University of Chicago wanted to pay her to visit them for a week to be studied, but she wanted no publicity.
In November 1945 Al Roush told me how he was onboard the U.S.S. Tidewater, a tanker, when at a point east of the Florida Keys, enroute to Galveston, he and the entire crew observed a brilliant disc-shaped object cross the face of the moon. The Tidewater radioed the sighting to Key West Naval Station to determine if perhaps it was an eclipse or something of this nature and the station radioed back that they had no explanation and that they had nothing visually. The object, Roush noted, seemed to have an apparent transparent quality to it.
Roush felt that this incident and his great interest in his youth with "falling stars" and wondering as to possible intelligent life out there, if these things might contribute to his mental awareness in which something along the lines of like attracts like in the realm of mind could help contribute to an actual "contact" experience, which he described happened to him years later, on August 6, 1958.
Reading up on how telepathy was a possible human ability he thought he'd give it a try. "I was running a series of communication drills which were attempted substitutes for radio frequency communications," he stated. "This is actually conscious reflexes, or these are mental reflexes. Like you pre-suggested its interest. Like whatever you're interested in you develop a series of reflexes and these reflexes, if they become intense enough, can actually cause a certain force or reflex to be transmitted."
So, at his home in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, on August 4th and 5th, in 1958, Roush engaged himself in personal telepathic efforts to communicate with UFO intelligences, during which time yellow globes of brilliant intensity and enormous size maneuvered in the skies near his home. A dizzy feeling overcame him that soon escalated into an intense spinning sensation. He sat down in a chair, hoping to get better, but it continued. Then he got up out of the chair and checked outside to observe that military looking jets were playing tag with the UFOs. He went and settled back in his chair whereupon the walls of his home no longer appeared solid in various places. It seemed that he could actually see through them and that on the other side of the walls was some kind of strange activity going on outside. Then he passed out. Within a short time, he was trying to regain consciousness. "I saw everything in that house, in my neighbor's houses, that neighborhood, completely different than I've ever seen it before and I could not believe what I saw. Because what I saw is ordinary people who became white dots spinning around in a kind of a black void. In other words, a human being looked not only transparent but white, like a white light within a black field."
I asked Roush how he could determine that they were human. "Because they were screaming," he said. "They were making noises. They were yelling and they were cursing, and they were cussing. And they were communicating."
I had already heard and read a good many UFO contactee accounts at this point, but this story seemed so wildly filled with deeply symbolic, archetypal themes I naturally couldn't help but imagine what sort of interpretations that the late Carl Jung would have interjected.
The story Roush told didn't stop there though. It continued to get even weirder, or should I say high strange, for the next thing he described was how a vertical beam of light to the right side of his chair appeared. He said that he found himself reaching for it (as if it was a matter of life and death he added) whereupon the black void vanished, and he got up and stepped into the beam. Glancing upwards he said he realized that he was looking upwards for the better part of a quarter mile at something. Then two humanoid beings appeared on opposite sides of the beam next to him, dressed in yellow-white robes. They had large heads, slanted eyebrows, with diamond metallic looking shaped things on their clothing. They stood about eight feet tall, had large chests. He was unable to distinguish their sex. They spoke no words. Then suddenly he and the two humanoids shot upwards, like they were in a very fast elevator, shooting up into what at first appeared to be an enormous green translucent sphere. Once inside he realized it was only translucent at certain points and he was now in the company of three of these humanoids.
While the humanoids remained silent, he felt that they were somehow instilling confidence in him. Earth looked like a mere dot behind them in a few seconds, he noted, while the giant sphere he was being transported in seemed to be following a long row of little red lights through space. Then they arrived at another world. "We were pulled up under some kind of a vacuum into what looked something like an enormous arena. This green sphere jettisoned itself up to a mass of land and all of us were instantaneously ejected from this green sphere and beached. Now this is the truth. We were physically beached on a physical beach."
"The first thing I saw were little kids. Five, six, eight, nine years of age, male and female. I'd say male and female on a quick judgement. The adults were all standing there. Everybody was moving. Not on their feet but above the ground. I can recall then we were taken to the left and I was permitted to see what their architecture was. They were humble buildings by contrast to our own, made out of slabs of stone and rock, and what looked like metallic silver and gold."
"The first communication that came out of anybody was, 'What do you think of us and what do you think of our planet?' I said, 'Great!'"
"Then they said, 'Now were going to show you construction.' These beings swished over to the right, and they said, 'Watch us cut the rock' and two of them stuck their arms out and they cut a slab. No tools. I said, at least somehow consciously, 'How can any being stand there and cut rock without tools?' And they instantly showed me (and I don't mean on a TV screen), hovering in their place, a red sphere, and it's hot. They explain, 'That is god energy. We know how to use it. But to us that's god and energy, and god and energy are one and we know how to use it.'"
Roush said he asked, "Where is the Great White Father?" He told me, "I don't know why I said this. This made them mad. They took me to another place where they had a stone octagonal court with gates in it and they put me in the middle. And they said, 'You stand it.' They opened the gates, and a lion would come out - a real, honest to God lion. So they said, 'Watch this force that contains the lion.' Because they had a force that kept the lion from moving. Then they got to the point. I was led to understand that evolution can occur in different directions at this point. That is, the thought forms that constitute the spirit are not the same as the thought forms that constitute the appearance of the body. At any rate, they called this the 'lion test.' They were showing that this force contained these lions or held the balance of nature so that nature does not attack. These beings again, in tight supervision, operated the energies which moved everybody into the green sphere. Again, appeared the red lights and the green sphere followed these lights again. Then came the point where they said, "'We're going to drop you.' They so arranged the energies that this looked like a gigantic whirlpool.'" Roush estimated the "drop" occurred perhaps some eight miles above the earth. "They did something, and these energies opened up and I could feel myself in a swirl going through this whirlpool. I regained consciousness and I checked my watch, and it was 4 o'clock in the morning. I got up and ran around, had a cup of coffee and walked outside. Those darned lights were in the sky and those jets were still chasing them!'"
Later at one point as I was again reviewing the recording I had made with Mr. Roush, I came upon the following, and as he was struggling it seemed to explain the so-called "lion test" he said, "We can have thought forms that are lions and bodies of men. That is, the thought forms that constitute the spirit are not the same as the thought forms that constitute the appearance of the body. At any rate, they called this the lion test. Now don't misunderstand me. This is all hard to understand when you're going through it and you might go through it. You might."
I paused for a moment. Had I gone through something similar? Or, that is, could it at the least have been an archetypal variation on Roush's "lion test"?
About two months after this interview, I was back in Maine, staying with my parents. I had become a Christian back in May of that year, but in my travels that year (practically the entire summer, traveling from Maine to Florida meeting and interviewing UFO researchers and experiencers) I had tried to remain objective and sought to understand possible spiritual, psychological, parapsychological and scientific connections between these unusual experiences. Some Christian friends I could tell felt I was in the wrong to have spent a summer in hot pursuit of such bizarre accounts. And then, on top of that, some suggested that maybe my faith wasn't enough. Perhaps I needed to be baptized in water, or even baptized in the spirit, or speaking in tongues. While I did later get baptized in a creek here in Tennesse, I saw no need to go any further.
At any rate, going back to around early October 1975, I decided to ask Creator to give me some sort of sign or visionary type experience that would help to lead me to the truth I needed, as opposed to a variety of different human opinions. Well, two nights later, a little after 11 p.m. as I recall, I was quite tired and headed for bed. As soon as I reached the bed however, I unexpectedly found myself moving across the floor of my darkened room back towards the open door to the still lite hallway outside. My father was making his final pitstop at the bathroom before retiring for the night himself. Now honestly, this all seemed to me at the time to be physically real. I was taken by surprise to find myself still out of bed headed to the doorway. But around the halfway point I stopped - or, that is, something stopped me. Although I felt no physical touch, I was certain that someone behind me was holding me back, but instead of turning around to see who it was, I simply continued to stare at the door. Unquestioningly this was very odd behavior, but at the time I questioned nothing. Next, I noticed out in the hallway, just beyond the door, appeared what looked like hundreds of translucent, pure luminous white spheres swirling around. Size of like large marbles. At the bottom of the door, on the floor area, right side of the doorway, the lights seemed to be clustering together in the shape of what looked like a small 4-legged animal, composed of white light.
It dawned on me sometime later how throughout this very peculiar experience I had felt no emotions. I didn't question things. There was no fear! Which, alas, was what I had requested two days earlier of Creator. But as the experience was unfolding, and it seemed to last mere seconds, I wasn't even thinking about what I had requested. Initially I was only interested in going to bed and sleeping.
Something else odd that eventually dawned on me was how when this brief experience ended, which as I stated seemed real and physical at the time, I instead found myself laying on my back, above the bed covers, staring up at the ceiling. The thing is my normal habit was to crawl straight into bed at bedtime, with covers pulled up around my neck (sometimes partially up over my head), and to be laying on my stomach or side.
Recently, on November 4th, while attending the Strange Realities conference in Nashville (TN), where a wide range of strange subject matter gets presented and discussed (naturally I did a talk on UFOs, John Keel, and high strangeness), a lady named Kiki Dombrowski was doing one on the so-called Gate Cards of the Tarot. I've learned that in Rachel Pollack's 78 Degrees of Wisdom there are these "gateway" cards. I noticed how they often presented like a doorway. Rachel has written that "they open up a path from the ordinary world to the inner level of archetypal experiences." Naturally, the doorway reminded me of what I was being shown in the hallway beyond my bedroom. With Roush's 1958 otherworldly experience he was placed in the middle of a stone octagonal court "with gates in it" from which a lion emerged, and a force was present that contained the "lion" from attacking. This, as he called it, was a "lion test," and was used to get their (the aliens) point across after demonstrating a "red sphere" that could cut through solid rock, which they called "god energy." They seemed to get angry that he didn't seem to quite understand what they were trying to explain to him.
Interestingly, in Newark, Ohio, there exists a massive ancient walled 20-acre circle of earth that via a narrow set of parallel walls connects with a walled 50-acre octagon earthen formation where there are eight openings to the octagon, in which just inside of the openings of the octagon are rectangular, truncated mounds. We've been to this location on several occasions with Dr. Greg Little and his wife Dr. Lora Little, who have traveled extensively to hundreds of ancient sites throughout North America. I recall Greg speculating how since a fairly common ancient and shamanic belief describes how spirit moves in straight lines, that in the ancient octagon of Newark it seemed likely that a spirit-related ceremony was conducted inside of it and the mounds at the openings were to block that energy from leaving the ceremonial site.
Together in 2001 Greg and Lora wrote a book on the mounds and Greg produced The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Native American Mounds & Earthworks (2009, 2016), along with other volumes, including the 2022 Origins of the Gods that Greg wrote with Andrew Collins.
In Greg's 1984 book The Archetype Experience he explored the late great Swiss psychologist Carl G. Jung's thoughts on the archetypes of the unconscious and what Jung thought in regard to the UFO phenomenon. After all, Jung's last book was his 1959 volume, Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky. "Through his study of ancient symbology, Jung realized that the mandala has always served the purpose of healing and resolving conflict by its appearance," Greg wrote. "He noted the same effect of the mandala upon his patients and he further studied the dream symbolism of other cultures. He found that particular symbols appeared and reappeared in dreams, art forms, and religious symbols in a consistent fashion. He also found that people were not aware that symbols had a consistent meaning; nor did many people have any idea of what symbols meant in other cultures." Greg furthermore wrote that he felt the archetypes manifested in a psychologically internal way and also physically in an external manner at times, and that plasma physics was the key to the physical manifestations. In 2022, Greg came out with a new reprint of The Archetype Experience, adding additional notes and insights acquired since the book was initially printed. He adds, after his own years of personal experimentation and research: "All I will say is that the archetypes, both the internal and external, do exist. It's perhaps most important to understand that archetypal manifestations always reflect their underlying nature, but it adapts to the percipient's unconscious state, culture, and expectations. It is a deep rabbit hole that outwardly looks crazy. But then the entire realm of the paranormal and the UFO phenomenon is crazy in that it violates the way we view reality."
Roush's octagon was a type of mandala. The gates (gateways, doorways, what have you) released lions. He was in the middle of the octagon, the inner circle of the mandala archetype, and an energy is brought into play that protects one from the wild beast, from nature. The center of the mandala is where the magic happens. It certainly was said to have happened rather magically for a young Crow warrior today known as Red Plume. This legendary story goes back to the early 1780s when this young Crow male made the nearly 10,000 foot climb up what today is known as Wyoming's Big Horn Medicine Wheel to walk to the center of the ancient wheel in bitter cold conditions to vision quest for four days and nights, at the conclusion of which he was approached he said by the "little people" who took him into tunnels below the wheel and for three days and nights instructed him in how to lead his people.
Madeline Teagle, who was part Iroquois, told me of yet another remarkable individual who was also known to produce phenomena witnessed by others. She told me of how she had once seen him perform a rain dance during a local dry spell and how it not only began to rain, but she observed four beings in the sky, one that looked "almost like a half bird, half human."
This individual was a Susquehannock medicine man she called Lightfoot, who lived with his wife Fleet Deer over in southeastern Pennsylvania, in Mahoney City. I came to visit him twice, and it was on my second visit (April 1977) that I was accompanied by my future wife Joan who has Cherokee ancestry and was quite interested in meeting him. After being invited to lunch with them at their home, Lightfoot suggested we retire to the living room and have a "pow wow" before we had to leave. Inside I chuckled to myself thinking he was being funny, but later on neither one of us was so sure. While he sat in an armchair and lit up tobacco in his pipe, Joan and I sat across from him on a divan. I soon found myself becoming very relaxed and shut my eyes whereas Joan was soon becoming very mesmerized by the smoke from Lightfoot's pipe. The smoke was behaving in a very unusual manner where it would extend out in say an opposite direction from one another, on a horizontal plane and then do the same thing, except on a vertical plane, and then do it again horizontally, and continue changing up horizonal and vertical several times (she lost count) until finally it was like a tunnel of smoke at the in-between point (the pipe) of all of this became her focus, where she found herself and Lightfoot looking at one another, whereupon it was as if a spell had been broken and everything returned to normal.
It wasn't until a couple of days later, while visiting with my parents up in Maine, that I thought to mention how odd that "pow wow" moment had been. I expressed how I had felt like I was going into a trance. Then Joan surprised me by recounting her experience. It seemed odd that we hadn't spoken of any of this before then. Quite sometime later we learned much more about Native American symbology and how this fit very well with the pattern of a Native American mandala, complete with the four directions and the circle in the center. Sometime later, we visited Madeline and she thought on it for a moment, at first looking away, and then returning her gaze back to us stated that would have been his "balanced way" and she also felt that something had been like passed psychically on to Joan. She did over the years since have a number of dreams about Lightfoot and I'm sure that the experience had further fueled her desire to learn more about her Native ancestry.
When we left Lightfoot's residence, he was up on the porch and Joan waved at him and he made a wave with an open hand from one side to the next and said, "Until our paths cross again." Joan says that for a couple or so days afterwards, she felt a strong connection with Lightfoot. On the way up to Maine, I stopped at one point to check the tires and a gentle breeze was rustling the leaves nearby and she had this feeling that Lightfoot was still with us in some way, watching over us.
It wasn't just the tarot card presentation that got me to recalling and reviewing these early investigative memories of mine recently. I'd suggest the long arm of synchronicity may once again be responsible. It started with an interview I did back on October 18th with Massimo Teodorani, an Italian astrophysicist who has been studying the mysterious earthlights at Hessdalen, Norway for a number of years, who authored the book The Hyperspace of Consciousness (2015) that delves into quantum physics, synchronicity, and plasma too. and his partner Susan Demeter, author of Cosmic Witch (who is originally from Canada), who are quite a team. In the interview (posted in the November issue of this magazine) Massimo describes seeing and photographing a "perfectly rectangular light" at Hessdalen. "What we saw there was that at some point some light balls were literally coming out from this rectangle." Photos are included on the page where the link to the interview is given, as well as their bios. Susan noted that an unexplained section was cut out of the earth there. No one seemingly had an explanation. "It was just this large rectangular door shape cut into the earth and Massimo's image of the light ball shows a rectangle in it. ...Is it trying to communicate something to us in a shape because if it is alien it's not necessarily going to be speaking Norwegian or English. They're going to have to try some form of communication, maybe through symbols."
Recently, I wrote Susan, who is well versed in ufology, parapsychology, and tarot as well (turns out she and Kiki Dombrowski are good friends in tarot) and shared my 1975 experience (visionary, psychoid, or whatever it was) and the door shape and balls of light synchronicity thing I was pondering at that point (now expanded even further here). Feeling a bit self-conscious (do I sound like a nut?) I wanted to see what she'd think of it. "Yes, I believe your experience in asking the Creator for insights can be related to these mysterious lights of Hessdalen," she replied. "There is a message there or a communication. In the end it may just be trying to say 'you are not alone.'"
"Synchronicity events always involve archetypes," Greg Little wrote in Origins of the Gods. "Synchronicity is, in fact, an archetype experience." He additionally added, "Synchronicity is becoming aware that all things are connected. It was this awareness that many shamans and Native American ceremonies sought to achieve and even manipulate."
Understanding the language of symbology and the host of complex psychic dynamics which revolve within its orbit is an immense challenge for us all. Especially for our modern dominant left-brained psyche. But, alas, it's a highly significant one that we should do our best at least to take a reasonable stab at. Especially in these troubled times of global and domestic conflict.
